Chapter 135: Trust 2

BONNIE

"I don’t even remember what I did to Johann," I said. "To you. I lost hours of my own life to something living inside me... some buried rage... that I didn’t know existed until it tore itself loose in front of half the court. And now, on top of that, I find out I’m a quarter god. That there are actual deities with some kind of claim staked on my existence, my choices, maybe even my future. That isn’t something I can just casually drop into conversation over breakfast, Fia. I don’t even know how to hold it myself yet."

"Do you not believe in Lysander?" Fia asked, quieter now, gentler.

"I do," I said, and something in my chest ached with how true that actually was. "I believe in him. More than I know what to do with it, if I’m being completely honest with myself. It terrifies me, actually, how much I’ve come to trust him in such a short amount of time." I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders, needing the weight of it. "But the man, my father, if I even have the right to call him that after everything, told me something specific. That he’s trapped somewhere here. Imprisoned, for something he did a long time ago. And that Lysander knows exactly where, and that he has a hand in it."

Fia’s eyes narrowed slightly, waiting for the rest of it.

"If I tell him what I am," I said, my voice dropping lower, "wouldn’t I just become something else to manage? Something dangerous, sitting inside his own home, connected by blood to the very thing his family has apparently spent time keeping locked away? Wouldn’t I stop being his mate and start being a problem he has to solve?"

"You cannot actually believe that," Fia said, crossing back to sit beside me again, taking both my hands this time.

"I don’t," I admitted, though the words came out smaller than I wanted them to. "Not really, not in the parts of me that are thinking clearly. But there’s this fear I can’t seem to shake loose, no matter how many times I try to reason my way past it. I know I should give him more credit than this. I know, somewhere underneath all of it, that he isn’t the kind of man who’d look at me differently just because of who fathered me. But knowing that and feeling it are two completely different things right now."

"You have to trust him more," Fia said, her voice steady, patient in a way that felt earned rather than performed. "I do not know if you remember what you sounded like in that courtyard. Even underneath all that rage, one thing came through clear as anything. You expected him to fail you. Before he’d even had the chance to. The way you spoke about him, about the promise he made you, it was like you’d already braced yourself for the disappointment days or weeks in advance, like some part of you had already written the ending before he’d even had the chance to act it out."

"And then he did fail me," I said. "Two men died. Exactly the way some part of me must have already known they would."

"You always have to expect disappointment," I continued, almost to myself now, the old, familiar logic surfacing without permission. "That way, when something tragic actually happens, it doesn’t blindside you completely. And when something good happens instead, it feels like a rare, undeserved gift rather than something you were foolish enough to count on."

"Does that not sound bleak to you?" Fia asked softly, "even as you’re the one saying it out loud?"

I didn’t answer that directly. Instead I said, "But the man is locked away somewhere. Contained. What’s the actual worst he can do to any of us from inside a cage he apparently can’t leave?"

"It starts with secrets," Fia said. "That’s the worst he can do. Not through force, not directly. Through the quiet, patient work of secrets, and secrets have a horrible way of becoming a habit you don’t even notice yourself forming until you’ve built an entire life around hiding things from the people who love you." She looked down at our joined hands for a moment, something distant crossing her expression. "I’ve kept secrets before, Bonnie. Big ones. I once had a vision that my own mate would die. And instead of telling him, instead of telling anyone, I told myself I knew better. That I could handle it alone. That saving him was somehow my responsibility to carry in silence."

My mind flashed immediately back to my own vision, the one Willow’s touch had shown me, my hands closing around her throat with a violence I still didn’t fully understand.

"But it didn’t happen," I said carefully. "Or is that something that’s still hanging over you, waiting?"

"It’s passed," Fia said. "The future I saw never came to be. But it might not have turned out that way if I’d kept it entirely to myself and let my own pride convince me I was the only one capable of stopping it. Secrecy nearly cost me everything I actually wanted to protect." She squeezed my hands, drawing my eyes back to hers. "You should do the same thing I eventually learned to do. Give people, give him, more grace than you’re currently allowing yourself to give. Why is it acceptable for you to make mistakes, to be forgiven for them, but somehow unacceptable to extend Lysander that same basic mercy?"

I didn’t have an answer ready for that. It sat in my chest instead, uncomfortable and true.

"Tell him about your father too," Fia said, quieter now, though no less insistent for the softness in her voice. "Whatever shape that conversation ends up taking, however long it takes you to find the right words for it, he deserves to hear it from you directly. Not from me. Not from a rumor that finds its way to him some other way."

"I’ll think about it," I said finally, my voice barely above a whisper.

I looked up at her, something close to pleading creeping into my expression now.

"But please, Fia. Please don’t be the one to tell him. I need to be the one who says it. When I’m actually ready. I just need a little more time to figure out how."